Thirteen Elegies for the Twentieth Century

Must be a Wo –
A loss or so –
To bend the eye
Best Beauty’s way –

- Emily Dickinson


1


Of a mouse -- What’s left --
Wings of an owl
To the ear -- Dropped watch in a field of grass
And streetlight –-
In a dog’s house, leash or bone -- Not the wind,

But the lights below -- And the snuffalump stumbling
Through the weeds –-
And something green we can’t get to sleep –-

No matter how hard we try –-


2


What’s left where there are books
-- And there are books --

And there are birds -- Something in me wrote

the foggy temples and their prayer flags –-

Not an hour later, the spirits came
Bearing gifts -- Not the wind

But light from below




3


-- And just when we know that we’re done for

-- The white moth -- In the shadow –
Paddles -- Down

To the garden –-
Where the hose drops its mouth
By the fence –-
And across the fence

The man with the broomstick and two garbage bags
Walks away from the dumpster
Muttering –-





4

Kids in new clothes walk to school
In threes –-

A crowd of pigeons on the line –-

And between the light from the sun
And the light from their eyes --
In a world where time sneaks closer every step
-- Delmore Schwartz
Takes a cab to John Berryman
And paces
Three minutes off the greeting room rug –-

Doesn’t say a word and takes
The same cab home –-



5


Our lives
Have become a kind
Of money


6


There are flags and there are fences –-

We are eight thousand pages and boxes full
Of sawdust –-

Hum of the carpenter bee’s wings

From a hole in our porch
Post to the black
-- Back of our creeping
Cat -- And the dirt at the root

In the spearmint’s clay pot
Is a caterpillar –-
Watch for the green ones,

The little fat ones –-

7


And not a week later that poor fucker
Delmore Schwartz dies

Abandoned –-

O Genius
Poetry -- Face down in the gutter –-
Quite

Literally –-

The tower leans into the alley,
The cat jumps over the moon –-

Eight million pages or a wide-eyed starlet –-

Our messenger birds
Have never stood

A chance –-



8


In the mulch pile foot long worms squirm & draw –-

Another kind of light
Entirely –-

9

O! O! But that light
From below! O! O! But here we still
Go! -- When I die

I wanna die like Allen Ginsberg

& sit up straight
In my bed! –-

When I die, I wanna die

Like Allen Ginsberg
& sit up straight

When I’m Dead!


10


But over in Pristina in the black-edged leaves
-- They back their black tanks
Like black carpenter bees

Back --
Into a house any one of us could’ve been born in
& Children appear & then they
Disappear –- It’s only been five minutes

-- After the door knock?

Black masks on neighborhood dogs
Broken feet
& Mountains of bodies -- Fire in every window

And women marched off
-- Like soldiers in their bathrobes--

Cows & horses everywhere -- Dead & mostly
Burnt -- And there are children
Who carry machine-guns

11


-- Every night
Becomes a late night –-

Sleep like a retired security guard at his desk –-

Who chased the dumpster
Divers

Away -- The universe is a blizzard

In a forest of storms
And each of us was a god there –-

By God –-

There –-




12


-- A week after he dies,

The willow my grandfather wanted to pull out
And off the backyard water-line
Falls -- A month and grandma’s lilac bush
What never in seven years
Bloomed before

Blooms –-

That’s ok –-
My mother will say –-

Across eighty billion miles of telephone wire

-- That makes
Perfectly good sense --




13


-- This inflatable world

In a backyard baby pool
On a second birthday in July -- With death all around
But not here

-- Like now-two-year-old Tynan Shifflet’s
Giant plastic-earth-ball with its wide-blue-mountains
And green-deep-oceans
-- You can jump on it --- You can

Bounce it off the floor -- But not here
-- Go ahead -- You can
Bounce it
Off the rafters

But not here -- Everything always touching on something else
Somewhere
-- We are people of small crowds and we

Move each other around